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Ex Parte Virginia (1880)

In Ex Parte Virginia, decided on March 1, 1880,
the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed congressional authority to enforce African
Americans' rights to serve on juries in state courts. The case began when a Pittsylvania County judge
named James D. Coles was indicted
in a U.S. district court for violating the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 by excluding black
men from juries. Ex Parte Virginia was handed down on the same
day as two other important decisions: Strauder v. West
Virginia, which declared that states could not limit jury service to white
men, and Virginia v. Rives, which prohibited federal courts
from claiming jurisdiction over a state case when the state court excluded African
Americans from the jury. In Ex Parte Virginia, the Supreme
Court ruled that the Fourteenth
Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, which guarantees citizens equal protection under the law,
authorized Congress to require that states not exclude African Americans from juries.
In these three related cases, the Supreme Court broadly interpreted the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth amendments
and declared that their purpose was to prohibit states from limiting the civil rights
of African American citizens or treating them in a different or inferior manner from
white citizens. Following the ruling, many state judges found other means to exclude
African Americans from jury service. MORE...

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Facts of the Case

Ex Parte Virginia was
the third of three cases involving African American jury service that the Supreme
Court decided on March 1, 1880. James D. Coles, a Pittsylvania County judge, was
indicted on February 27, 1879, for refusing to allow African Americans to serve on
juries. The federal grand juries that met in Danville and Lynchburg in February and March 1879 indicted judges
from the following fourteen counties for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by
barring African Americans from jury service: Amherst, Appomattox, Bedford, Botetourt, Buckingham, Campbell, Charlotte, Franklin, Fluvanna, Henry, Nelson, Patrick (the court involved in Virginia v. Rives), Pittsylvania, and Roanoke. The federal District Court judge Alexander Rives had the
judges arrested so that they could stand trial.

Coles petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus to direct
Rives to release him on the grounds that a federal judge had no legal authority to
arrest, jail, or try him. James
G. Field, the Virginia attorney general, also intervened on behalf
of the Commonwealth of Virginia and petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of
habeas corpus to release the state judge. The Supreme Court heard arguments and
decided the two petitions for the writ as one. The phrase "Ex Parte" in the title
indicates that it was a judicial proceeding involving one party, the Commonwealth
of Virginia, and not an adversarial proceeding between two or more parties.

Legal Background and Related Cases

After the abolition of slavery in the United States,
Congress required most of the states of the former Confederacy to write new constitutions and
to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Congress also passed a series of Reconstruction acts to secure the civil and
political rights of former slaves, including the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1875
that prohibited states from racial discrimination in public places,
transportation, and jury selection. The act was drafted by Charles Sumner, a
senator and Radical
Republican from Massachusetts, and John Mercer Langston, then the dean of Howard
University law school and later the first African American congressman from Virginia.

The question at issue in the three cases decided on March 1, 1880, was whether the
Fourteenth Amendment authorized Congress to forbid states to exclude African
Americans from juries, a major extension of federal power over the states. In Strauder v. West Virginia, the first case, the Supreme Court
declared unconstitutional a West
Virginia law restricting jury service to white men as a violation of the
citizenship rights of African Americans guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The fifth section of the amendment granted Congress the power to enforce its
provisions by "appropriate legislation." The judges declared that the provisions
in the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by which Congress had forbidden states from
excluding African Americans from service on state juries were an appropriate means
of protecting that civil right.

Virginia v. Rives, the second case, arose in Virginia after
Rives ordered that a controversial murder trial involving African American
defendants be removed from the circuit court of Patrick County to the U.S. Circuit
Court for the Western District of Virginia. Rives issued the order because the
judge in Patrick County had consistently refused to permit qualified African
Americans to serve on juries. Attorney General Field appealed that order to the
U.S. Supreme Court. The court decided that Rives had no authority under federal
law to take the trial into the federal court system. The ruling was limited to the
authority of the federal judge to take the case out of the county judge's court
and did not directly deal with the issue of African American jury service.

In 1879, Virginia law did not specifically exclude African Americans from jury
service. It stated, "All male citizens twenty-one years of age, and not over
sixty, who are entitled to vote and hold office, under the constitution and laws
of this state, shall be liable to serve as jurors" unless exempted for some other
reason unrelated to race. According to the law, judges were neither required to
include nor exclude qualified African Americans. By not placing the names of
qualified African American voters in the boxes from which they randomly drew names
of men to be called for jury duty, Judge Coles and other Virginia state judges had
decided on their own to exclude African Americans from jury selection.

Supreme Court

The attorney general of Virginia and his associate counsel, the attorney William J. Robertson,
represented Virginia in Ex Parte Virginia when the justices
of the Supreme Court heard the petition for the writ of habeas corpus. Field and
Robertson argued that Rives and the federal grand jury had no authority to indict,
arrest, or try Coles or any of the other judges because Congress had no authority
under the Constitution to adopt that section in the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
States had always had the exclusive right to set qualifications for jury service,
they argued, and the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 were therefore not
"appropriate legislation" within the meaning and purpose of the Fourteenth
Amendment. Field and Robertson also argued that the action of a judge in a state
court was a personal act and not technically a state act, and therefore it could
not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited states, not individual
persons, from denying rights of citizenship.

The U.S. attorney general, Charles Devens,
argued that the section of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited states
from excluding African Americans was, indeed, an appropriate exercise of
congressional power to enforce the guarantee of substantial equal liberty that the
Fourteenth Amendment provided to all citizens. Moreover, a judge, being an officer
of the state, acted for the state in enforcing and applying its laws and was
therefore required to act in conformity with the Civil Rights Act.

Associate Justice William Strong delivered the Supreme Court's decision in Ex Parte Virginia (as he had in Strauder
v. West Virginia and in Virginia v. Rives) and
refused to issue the writ of habeas corpus that would have released Coles. For
himself and a majority of the other judges, Strong declared that the purposes of
the three amendments to the U.S. Constitution adopted in the years immediately
after the American Civil War
(1861–1865) were to define and guarantee the rights of citizens, specifically the
rights of African Americans who had been freed from slavery. The judges of the
Supreme Court had been of divided opinions about how to interpret the imprecise
language of the Fourteenth Amendment, particularly the "privileges and immunities
of citizenship" and "equal protection of the laws" clauses. In 1873, in the Slaughter-House Cases, the Supreme Court had narrowly
interpreted them as protecting only rights guaranteed to citizens of the United
States and not to rights that people possessed as citizens of any particular
state.

In Ex Parte Virginia and in Strauder v.
West Virginia, the majority of the justices interpreted the phrases and
the whole of the Fourteenth Amendment more broadly. They specifically declared
that Section 5 of the amendment granted Congress constitutional authority to enact
a law that prohibited states from excluding African Americans from jury service in
state courts, and they declared that jury service was a right of citizenship. That
applied to states under Strauder v. West Virginia and to
state judges who actually selected jury members under Ex Parte
Virginia.

Associate Justice Stephen J. Field dissented
on two grounds. He and Justice Nathan Clifford, who joined the dissent, stated
that the indictment under which Coles and the other judges had been jailed was too
vague and was therefore invalid. For that reason, he believed that the judges
should be released from confinement and from the threat of prosecution. Field also
maintained that states had always had, and should continue to have, the right to
establish qualifications for jury service in state courts. He distinguished
between the civil rights that the Fourteenth Amendment protected and the political
rights that he stated it did not protect. Field defined jury service as a
political right that remained within the jurisdiction of the states, and he cited
the Virginia Code that declared that only eligible voters were qualified for jury
service. He also pointed out that Congress had to propose and the states to ratify
the Fifteenth Amendment that prohibited states from denying the right to vote to
men because of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude because that
was a political right that the Fourteenth Amendment had not protected.

Legacy

Ex Parte Virginia together with Strauder
v. West Virginia confirmed the constitutionality of the section of the
Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited states and state judges from excluding
African American men from service on juries. More broadly, the two cases were an
important confirmation and explanation of the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment
and of the extensive power that it conferred on Congress to protect citizens'
rights from state abridgment.

Following the Supreme Court's decisions in Virginia v.
Rives and Ex Parte Virginia, Judge Rives tried two
of the county judges in his federal court, but Attorney General Field declined to
defend them. Even though Field disagreed with the Supreme Court's opinion in Virginia v. Rives, he recognized it as the controlling
interpretation of the federal law. Mixed-race juries acquitted both judges, and
Rives soon thereafter dismissed all the other cases. That did not mean, however,
that large numbers of African Americans served on juries in
late-nineteenth-century Virginia. The state's judges, sustained by the Virginia
Supreme Court of Appeals, interpreted the law and the cases as not requiring black
jurors in cases with black plaintiffs or defendants, and often found other reasons
not to seat African American jurors.

Judge Coles was not one of the judges tried in Rives's federal court, nor did he
have occasion to select or reject any more qualified voters for jury duty. After
the Conservative Party
had lost its majority in the two houses of the General Assembly the previous November, the
Readjuster Party
majority elected new judges for many counties and cities, including Pittsylvania
County. Coles ceased to be the county judge in February 1880, about ten days
before the Supreme Court's decision in Ex Parte Virginia.
Political support for strong civil rights laws declined during the 1880s, and
federal courts invalidated some of the laws that Congress had passed. In 1883, in
several cases decided together under the title Civil Rights
Cases, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the portions of the
Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited personal, not state-enforced, acts of
racial discrimination.

Legal scholars and civil rights advocates
have long recognized the importance of the Supreme Court's interpretation of the
Fourteenth Amendment in Ex Parte Virginia. Federal courts
have repeatedly cited it to explain the broad meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment
and how it changed the relationship between the federal and state governments. In
recognition of the enduring national importance of Ex Parte
Virginia in defining rights of citizenship, in 1987 the Pittsylvania
County Courthouse, where Coles had routinely excluded African Americans from jury
service, became a National Historic Landmark.

Time Line

February 8, 1865
- The Senate of Virginia of the Restored government votes 5 to 0 to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolishes slavery.

February 9, 1865
- The House of Delegates of the Restored government votes 9 to 2 to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolishes slavery. Virginia becomes the twelfth state to ratify the amendment.

January 9, 1867
- Members of both houses of the General Assembly of Virginia vote against ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

March 2, 1867
- The U.S. Congress requires that the legislature of each state in the former Confederacy ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before its senators and elected representatives can be seated in Congress.

July 6, 1869
- Voters ratify a new state constitution, often called the Underwood Constitution, rejecting separate provisions that would have disfranchised men who had held civil or military office under the Confederacy. The new constitution supplants the former one, proclaimed on April 7, 1864.

October 8, 1869
- Both houses of the General Assembly of Virginia ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

1873
- The U.S. Supreme Court decides the Slaughter-House Cases with a narrow definition of the Reconstruction amendments, ruling that they protect only the rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens and not the rights possessed by citizens of any particular state.

March 1, 1875
- Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that bans racial discrimination in public places, transportation, and jury selection.

February 27, 1879
- Federal grand juries in Lynchburg and Danville indict James D. Coles, a Pittsylvania County judge, and thirteen other judges for excluding African American men from juries.

March 1879
- James D. Coles, a Pittsylvania County judge, is arrested by a federal marshal at the Pittsylvania County Courthouse for excluding African American men from juries.

October 1879
- James D. Coles, a Pittsylvania County judge, and the Commonwealth of Virginia petition the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus to release Coles from arrest for excluding African American men from juries.

February 18, 1880
- James D. Coles finishes his term as a Pittsylvania County judge.

March 1, 1880
- In Strauder v. West Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that the Fourteenth Amendment grants Congress the power to enforce racially inclusive state jury selection.

March 1, 1880
- In Virginia v. Rives, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that a federal circuit court cannot claim jurisdiction over a state case when the state illegally discriminates in jury selection based on race.

March 1, 1880
- In Ex Parte Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court rules constitutional a provision in the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prevents anyone from being disqualified from jury service by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

October 15, 1883
- As part of the consolidated Civil Rights Cases, the U.S. Supreme Court rules unconstitutional some provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and declares that the constitution only forbids slavery and not public discrimination.

September 9, 1957
- The Civil Rights Act of 1957 becomes the first federal law to address the infringement of civil rights since the 1870s.

1987
- Pittsylvania County Courthouse is declared a National Historic Landmark.